Photograph by Gary Halby

This has been called a million dollar photo according to the New York Post Article “Photo op in crane case“. It was taken by Gary Halby just moments before this crane collapsed killing 7 people on Manhattan’s East Side in 2008. Gary was not at all involved with the project, he just happened to be walking down the street and liked the image of this crane against the blue sky. Little did he know that the rigging captured at the bottom of the photo would be the cause of a fatal accident. Prosecutors will now be using this image as they make their case against the crane rigger involved with the accident. The case is scheduled to start next week.

This is a tragic reminder for construction photographers to always photograph large equipment like cranes including their rigging equipment when you’re out taking your progress photos.

Here are some more photos of the accident from the New York Times.

For the past week I’ve been installing a webcam in Golden, CO. This is my first attempt at a wireless/solar webcam installation. It’s been kicking my butt and also providing some great On the Job Training. I’ll post more details on the installation later, I’m still working through a few bugs. However before I get side tracked I wanted to talk about something that I realized while designing the webcam interface for JobSiteVisitor.com. The lighting and consistency of the time-lapse slide show would be much more uniform and less distracting to watch if the photos were all taken around the same time of day. This makes sense, right?

Previous construction time-lapses movies I’ve made consisted of images taken every 10-15 minutes through out the day. All these photos were then dropped onto a time line and speed-up like 500%. The effect was very cool however the changing daylight is very distracting. This video will show you what I mean.

So with JobSiteVisitor.com’s new webcam integration users will see real time webcam images but we’re only going to archive one photo from the same time each day. This will provide more consistent lighting for our time-lapse viewing. This integration will be available in the upper subscription package with-in the next week. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts on this added feature.

Managing Construction photos can get out of hand when you’re taking photos every week. It’s important to have a plan regarding how you’re project plans to organize their progress photos. Often times project will have multiple people taking photos on multiple cameras. This slide show is designed to provide some basic information on why it’s a good idea to organize progress photos using JobSiteVisitor.com. The slide show also shows examples of what happens when you take progress photos from the same location on a regular basis over the duration of the project. A funny thing happens… you are able to document progress with your progress photos.

Anytime you’re taking progress photos on a construction site you’re going to be dealing with dust and dark areas. The combination of these two things makes it very difficult to take a good picture. What happens when you’re taking a photo in low light the first thing you want to do is turn on your flash. This works for most situations however when you’re on a construction site you often get a bunch of white dots all over your picture. These dots are caused by the flash bouncing off the dust particles near the lens which then find their way onto your picture. Above are (2) photos taken in the same area with different cameras. The one on the left was taken with a hand-held Point and Shoot camera with a flash and the photo on the right was taken with a hand-held SLR camera.

So how do we solve this Dust Dot issue? (more…)

360 Test

In rooms where there’s lots of electrical and plumbing in the walls it’s not a bad idea to take what are known as “In-Wall Rough-in” photos. These are photos used to document everything in the wall. They should be taken during a short time window between the final rough-in inspections and the start of drywall.

If you’ve ever had to take Rough-in photos with a regular point and shoot camera you know how difficult this task can be. Your typical job site camera can’t photograph the entire room and you usually end up with multiple shots in each room. It’s very time consuming and often yield less than desired results. Try taking 360-Virtual tours of your rooms. (more…)